Design, Play, Disrupt: Curating the V&A's Videogame Exhibition

[Music] good morning thank you so much for coming out to the talk today I was really curious I have been really curious to know who would be coming out early in the morning on a Wednesday the games conference for a talk about curation and this.you are those people then as you and so as obviously that means that you are the best people here and the people who care about video games the most so well done everybody um so yeah so my name is Marie folston I am a playful curator and producer of playful Procuratorate producer and so my name is somebody who's been working for the past sort of eight years or so as curator in and around video games and playful digital interactive works the majority of the work that I've done in this space over that time has been sort of quite grassroots or independent and it specifically been involved with the

exhibition and display of independent on alternative video games and that has specifically been work that I've undertaken as part of a collective that I'm the co-founder of and code collaborator with which is wild rumpus so you can see some photographs here of some of the work and the project that I've undertaken previously but that is not really the work that I'm going to talk about this morning because sadly I don't have we've got 30 minutes today and I don't think in 30 minutes I can quite empowering why two grown men are stood in a paddling pool riding around with move controller's tied to their limbs so if at the end of the talk when you get the surveys asking you to rate the talk if it's highly rated enough then I promise I'll be back next year to unpack and explain that but yeah so I'm sorry I'm not really here today to talk about the work that I've done as part of wild rumpus although that's something that I very much consider to be part of my curatorial practice instead I'm here

to talk to you about the work that I've been undertaking over the past four years at this institution at this place so if you're unfamiliar this beautiful building that you're looking at is the Victorian Albert Museum in London this is one of the world's largest museums of design and it's a museum that really interested in design process and I've been really fortunate to have the had the opportunity in the privilege to have worked here for the past four years as the as their curator of video games and that work across that time has been primarily spent working as the lead curator of a major exhibition that took place at the museum from September 2018 and it closed a matter of weeks ago on February 24th 2019 and that exhibition was as you can see with video games design played disrupt this was a major

exhibition that looked at video game design through very sort of contemporary lens and say although the exhibition has closed it's one that is going on to tour internationally it's going to be opening at V&A Dundee on the 20th of April this year before going on to visit other institutions internationally so if you not had a chance to catch the show then hopefully you will bump into it at some museum or gallery on its travels around the world over the next sort of few years so as I stand here today as the lead curator on their exhibition I have to acknowledge obviously that this is a project that has taken Iran about from end to end this took four years to undertake and it's a project that was realised with the work and dedication and contribution of a team of hundreds this is a project that sort of encompass project curators conservative interpreters conservators designers builders editors filmmakers academics developers games designers who lent their works to the show and so I've put

up here just a few of the names from some of their key contributors to the exhibition who worked on that project over the years that creating an exhibition is a complex and complicated task I so just a call that a few at that the sort of really key people that worked on the exhibition so Christian volsung who was the exhibition's research curator who was my curatorial partner in crime especially our exhibition management team as Samantha King Ana belén Martinez Ruth Law and Tessa peers and our exhibitions management team are really sort of the producers of the exhibition and they were an absolute powerhouse of a team that pulled off an incredibly impressive a complex feat with this exhibition we're really fortunate to work along some amazing designers who are exhibition designers Pinilla ostrich studio and squint opera who wanted to be AV a design of the exhibition and also Julia who did our sort of 2d and/or graphic design so often this is the point in what I'm talking about the

exhibition that I'm normally lobbying for sort of the the lobby to audiences about the valley were the impact of video games in museums but stood here at the Game Developers Conference I don't feel that you're an audience that really needs to be one round about the virtues or the significance of video games as a really fascinating an important contemporary design discipline but still video games within cultural institutions such as the V&A is still rare and unexpected and unusual but for any institution that is engaging with design or contemporary design video games are an insignificant force within our culture today and as such they are a medium that institutions need to be engaging with and embracing there are an estimated 2.2 billion people in the world today who play video games as a quarter of the world's population and when we look at the fact that say the 2017 finals of the League of Legends World Championships took place in the Beijing's Bird's Nest birdnest arena or

Stadium which is an olympic stadium has a capacity of 80,000 we can see the scale and reach of video games and it's undeniable and we also see these cultural spaces at video games now occupy but when we talk about or try to justify video games through these numbers we're really only looking at the medium from afar we're looking at it through this sort of sense of scale of reach of an industry and those facts and figures to me don't necessarily do the work that is needed to begin to open up or integrally manifest and make rips through make sort of visible what is so fascinating and unique about video game design and so in the very early stages of the exhibition I worked a lot to try and find a cool quote or a concept or an idea that to me got to the sort of fundamental aspects of what makes video games such a unique and fascinating discipline and I came across this quote which was a line from Frank Lance's talk hearts and minds which is a really great

talk from GDC that he presented in 2014 and this is a quote that says making games combines everything that's hard about building a bridge and everything that's hard about composing an opera games are operas made out of bridges this is a really confident on bombastic statement here we're aligning video games with the sort of cultural heights of operas and with unequally forms such as these are central forms such as engineering but for me not just that confidence in this statement but also the fact that this is a statement that allows us to view video games as this system this sort of cultural form that sort of embodies the subjective emotional aesthetic design but also this objective system design of systems of engineering of rules and there is a fascinating tension where those two points meet and for me that is what we wanted to get to the heart of in this exhibition to evoke it instill in people what is so important unique and equally for me that this space when we were able

to reduce video games to and sort of the fundamental sort of their basics I think it gives us a little bit of breathing space to understand or to perhaps envisage much broader horizons about the discipline it allows us to cast off some of the assumptions as stereotypes or some of the hang-ups that perhaps sometimes sometimes sort of overshadow the discipline and so this is the first quote that people come to when they come to the exhibition they first see when they come into the exhibition so it's an exhibition that was seeking to really challenge people's expectations this is an exhibition that's thought to take risks and for one this is a show which was deciding to not look back over at a nostalgic retro past instead we're looking at video games from the here and now we're looking at a period of time from the mid 2000s through to the present day the reason why we've decided on that specific time frame is that sort of within the mid-2000s we have a whole host of technological catalysts from smartphone to broadband to social media all of which have had a radical radical

impact on the way that games are designed the way that they're discussed and the way that they're played equally this was an exhibition that was trying to find a new curatorial language for video games we wanted to look beyond video games purely as a playable object to find new ways of opening up and making visible this as a as a fascinating design medium um and one of the things that is particularly surprising is that one of the first objects that was ever confirmed as alone for the exhibition was in fact a painting this Magritte painting that you can see the blank signature which formed a sort of a key inspirational touch point for this scene in Kabul computers again Kentucky route zero and for me sort of this is something that speaks to what is so intrinsically valuable about bringing video games into spaces such as museums it is not to say that aligning video games alongside painting alongside these established sort of artistic masters it's not to say great now video

games are elevated to some lofty sort of space now these are culture now this is art instead is to show how video games as a contemporary discipline is is not it does not sit as some sort of isolated cultural design discipline it is intricately intricately connected to this long history of visual arts of literature of culture that it is a continuation of this subjects and the mediums and the disciplines that sit within the spaces such as the VNA and so now I'm just going to show you a short video which just perhaps gives you an insight into the way that the space was realized if it's going to play here we go [Music] [Applause] [Music]

[Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] so that gives you just a bit of an overview into the sort of space of the exhibition and what we undertook with the show so as I said just shortly before this was an exhibition that we're

seeking to identify and find a new curatorial for language for video games and for that we wanted to look beyond the game as a playable object to decentralize that as an object for an exhibition because bringing video games into museum spaces and exhibiting it is a complex complex thing to do because apparently we're trying to fit a square peg into a round hole we're bringing video games and medium that is plural of medium that is ephemeral and medium that is digital into an institution whose entire structures and infrastructure is centered around valuing there's sort of physical objects around sort of objects that exist sort of materially that have this sort of singularity and through that we have this sort of conflict of the way in which we can perhaps sort of view a game in that space and playable games in terms of an exhibition space it's not to say that I completely sort of disagree with the idea of bringing a game as a playable work into an exhibition as being the best means to

display but it's really a question of context this is an exhibition that wanted to open up video games as a design object and so see if we bring a video game into that space an object that might take upwards of 30 hours for you to play it before you can really realize or see that as a design object do you as a visitor have time to have that engagement with that work equally we have issues of capacity how many people can play a video game in a public space we also have issues of literacy who comes in with the skills and the knowledge of how to play and interact with a video game in order to be able to perceive it or experience it as a design object and that's equally to speak of the fear of performance within a public space that people feel that pressure performing or playing a video game in public so if we're not looking at the video game as the sort of key object and we want to find any curatorial language what does that look like how do we approach this and this way sort of comes back to looking at sort of other areas and other disciplines in a way that they have approached

exhibiting different design disciplines or equally games and a really key inspirational work for me is the series by her infer okie parallels by one to four and this is a series of video installations that the artist created and when you experience this artwork you were really surrendering your autonomy as a player to play to be able to play these games as work that actually has a showcase as a series of playthroughs of key games like Red Dead Redemption Ola noir and what you're watching is the artist playing these games in this very intentional and considered way that's very choreographed but almost seemingly a little bit irrational in his playthroughs he's sometimes repeatedly pushing NPCs to sort of push their behavior to respond in a different way he's repeatedly sort of approaching them and sort of pushing their behaviour or he's sometimes going through games with a thick sort of specific path that he wants to travel through sort of any one landscape but frequently coming up against the invisible walls or barriers

that sort of are in place in that game to sort of direct or divert sort of plays into other areas and by watching these playthroughs by watching this to me it begins to you begin to see as a as a as a person watching this artwork you begin to see the seams in these video games you begin to perceive the materiality you begin to see sort of the considerations and the decisions that the designers have had to have made to be able to create those works and this installation for me it is perhaps one of the most inspirational and installations I've seen because it has explained to me or presented to me a video game as a designed object in an exhibition space far greater than actually any exhibition that I'd been to that actually it tried to do so through the playable works and so again it's looking at spaces or concepts like this of how we can consider curation and I think veneers are curated that is really where my provocation starts from that's where my practice is centred at the moment is understanding that you as a curator take on the responsibility or the role of a

player that it is your responsibility to look at a video game to identify what play through what way or what lens do I want you to understand or appreciate this work so the exhibition was one that was broken across three key sections and those key sections were the first was new designers this was a section in the exhibition which is perhaps a slightly more traditional approach to the way that the VNA would normally display design disciplines it was a space where we looked into the design discipline or the design practice of eight key contemporary videogames it was a very cliquey range of games that were sort of from different genres that were from designers of different scales so from big tripoli blockbusters to small independent studios they were games which all had different design ambitions but the thing that unites every single game within this section every single game in the whole exhibition is that they're breaking

they're breaking new ground in some way that they are groundbreaking they're pushing our expectations of what video games are or what they can be in new ways in disruptors the second section we looked at the social and political conversations that surround video games and understanding that if we're to really appreciate and respect video games as a contemporary design discipline we need to have the same critical and nuanced conversations about that discipline as we do any other creative field or medium and the last section of the exhibition was sort of split into two halves and this is where we were looking at video games from the perspective of the player and understand that actually no story or no perspective on contemporary design and video games is complete without an also acknowledging or appreciating the design stories of the player and acknowledging that the way that many players interact with video games these days transcends the role of the designer and so we have one sort of space players online which was looking at the modes of creativity that players engaged in mass online

games but you clue players offline where we look at the rise of the DIY arcade scene of games that are of nisha of DIY games of spectacle and performance but I have limited time this morning to talk you through an exhibition that has been sort of four years in the making so instead I'm just going to talk you quickly through one of the games in the first section in new designers has a bit of a case study about the way that we decided to approach that and to just sort of show you the approach that we took with our curating it so the first game that you come to in the exhibition is journey 2012 game by that game company and the view is not playing this is normally the point where I say I don't know why I choose to work with technology when technology chooses to not work with me imagine this video is playing I'm assuming this is an audience that has a lot of familiarity of that video games so you're normally watching the character sort of surf down the sand dunes at this point began so the first game that you come to in the exhibition

is a 2012 game journey by that game company and this is a game if you're not familiar where you play as this rogue figure traveling across this desert landscape journeying towards this sort of mountain peak in the distance and as you play you begin to come across other sort of players in the game is you these robed characters and these aren't obviously not other NPC's in the game these are other players playing at game enormous anonymously alongside you and that game tool company when they talk about their motivations for this game they talk about the fact that at the time they perceive the emotional spectrum that was a VOC Tim players through video games to be quite limited and they wanted to create a game that evoke different emotional responses and players they wanted to create a game that evoke feelings of love of empathy of companionship and so for us as curators this was the approach that we took with this work how do we make visible that creative intent how do we showcase this as a game that really speaks of this independent design studio creating this sort of ambitious

groundbreaking work and so the curation work that we took for sort of many years was a period of research it was reaching out to the designers of many of the games that we exhibited in the exhibition and the thing that we asked them was to own put up their notebooks and hard drives to show us okay we understand the game as sort of the end as this sort of end sort of work that you've created but once of the materials and artifacts existed from your design process and it's something that sort of for me speaks to the way in which we can consider the curation of videogames to be something that can take learnings from say I feel such as architecture and it was something like one of my colleagues at they said to me at one point about his work as a curator in architecture he said well it's curators in architecture we don't really ever collect architecture we collect the debris and what he's talking about there is not sort of debris might seem like a dismissive tone but what he's talking about is the fact that architecture equally suffers with these issues of

complexity and scale within museum spaces that there's a very sort of strong issues of a physical scale that show us why architecture is a complex medium to bring into a museum that you can't necessarily display many buildings inside another building and so instead this is a field that's had to work to identify different objects and materials and artifacts that can be brought into an exhibition space that helped to present to a visitor and show that as a designed object and so we spoke with these different designers to get them to show this materiality of this debris that existed from their design process and the object that you're looking at in front of you is a notebook from journeys Robin Hunicke and for me this was something as an object that I really loved that no matter which design studio which designers we spoke to you over the course of our research so many of them would still come back to the notebook and when we're trying to connect videogames or align videogames to these other cultural disciplines that those perhaps know one single object which

best communicates or illuminates the fact that videogames is still as a medium that is still built around the same tools or the same sort of practices as whether design disciplines as something such as the humble notebook it's also something which helps sort of remind us of the humanity of the personalities of the people behind video games which is something for me that is so important to convey and just to quickly talk through a few of the other objects that we have in this space so here we have some of the artwork the concept art by the games art director meant never on the left hand side we can see sort of the digital concept art which is one of the first paintings a digital painting of the white light of the mountain which is sort of this end point in the game and here we see these small characters at the sort of at the foot of this mountain of this crevice and it's again evoke in these feelings of feelings small in a space of that sense of or and that need to sort of huddle together in this sort of face of this huge obstacle and we have the pencil sketches as well which show Matt Navas sort of design of

thinking about the way in which the character of the game would move through these enviros in different spaces we also have the research as well at the team and this is a series of videos the team undertook when they went out to Pismo Beach to as they sort of in their words they weren't going out to research to create a game that was trying to sort of be sort of photorealistic they were not looking for sort of photo photorealistic reality and again they wanted it to feel real so they're going out to see what is it like just jump down the side of a sand dune what is it like to sort of right across the sand in with your arms tied to your sides and again this is an object in an exhibition space which helps just remind us of the sort of people behind this works it puts faces to that it reminds us of sort of the research that they undertake and it includes that are quite humorous in pods and equally the prototypes of the game that this is one of the early prototypes of journey the dragon prototype where we see two players travelling through sort of a level and as they sort of come together they're sort of able to they

sort of get this sort of white circle that surrounds the players which gives them the ability to surmount certain obstacles to be able to achieve things that they wouldn't so again looking at a prototype that for many people who are unfamiliar with video game design this is something which is so visually strikingly different from the end game that it helps them to understand this idea of how games designers iterate their practice to think about the way in which the way in which we set up these rules in these systems and do players and do people actually react and respond in a way that we expect them to I'm also sort of talk romantically about the notebook as as a object which can help sort of unite people around sort of this sort of sense of the sense of connection with video games is a design discipline an object that's sort of really resonated with a lot of visitors to the show was with this spreadsheet because I think in all honesty for no matter what discipline on what work you want to take there's perhaps no object that's sort of unites it's great and

then a really beautifully crafted spreadsheet and so this was this was the designers sort of attempts that are quite later on in the development of the game map out the emotional journey of the game but to map that across the different layers and levels of the different aspects of the game and the way in which they all work to feed in towards this idea of the emotional journey that players would go through and you can see at the top of this this sort of this sort of curve that's been plotted out that actually maps on to this idea of the hero's journey if you're familiar with that as a as a graph as a concept of an emotional arc that people will progress through after a narrative or a story and so all together these are objects that we brought together into and the space and here's a slide which should it just gives you an idea of the way that these objects were brought into the exhibition the two visitors coming into the show that you have this ability to see at a glance or to see in detail this variety of different materiality the variety of different approaches the different objects the different aspects that constitute everything that tells a much fuller in a much richer perspective of

journey as a designed as a complex design object and this idea that these sort of constellations of objects for something that was repeated across every single game in that out in that first section of the exhibition and sitting Center in that corner of this sort of collection of objects was a central installation and the way that I talk about this is to think about this approach is to thinking about video game to think about these displays as constellations that we have this sort of constellation of this debris of this materials and artifacts the speaker the design process but centered within that is this key installation a sort of major point that commands attention that provides an experience that enables visitors to see that game from a slightly different perspective and so these are the different installations that we created for each of the games in our first part of the exhibition and for journey it comes back to the fact that as curators we wanted to show this game as one which was sort of really challenging the emotional journey or the emotional experiences of players and that's what this installation needed to

communicate we needed to present a way of them being able to see that video game I'm sort of in a moment or in a sort of brief glance it's sort of the dwell time or anticipated dwell time of any visitor on any one installation is perhaps around about sort of five to six minutes and so the way that we created this was to create to bring together two key scenes from the video game that sort of represented these two emotional of high points so we have the sort of sand surfing level this sort of emotional high point it's really rich sort of warm space for the sort of joy of surfing down these sand levels and at the end we have to sort of a level from later on in the game where you'll sort of this character that's struggling up this mountain space with a wind blowing you back which to visitors enables them to see sort of this game and these two emotional high points of this game sort of at a glance and into in between each of those we decided to create us something which allowed them to see a cross-section of each of the levels and this was something that was inspired by some of the concept artists that the studio had actually created and this is some of the early concept or some of the

concept art for the game which shows each of the levels in journey is sort of different cross sections where you're allowed to see sort of the fact that the curvature of the ground actually represents sort of that curve of the again that sort of emotional graph that players or expect your anticipated to feel as they go through the game and so from that we created this it's a shame that so many these videos aren't playing but what become way too far did it do it hooray thank you I'm so yeah so you can see here this sort of cross-section I've actually every single one of the levels in the video game which it gains sort of is something that we created not sort of independent these creatures we created this looking to the intentions look into the design objects of the designers understanding what it was that they were seeking to communicate through their work and choosing how to represent that or trying to find a way to interpret it that game within a physical space that gave people the ability to view that game interview it's sort of as a designed object at a glance and so bringing all of these objects together

is for us sort of was a way to try and sort of present to people and to show them these these video games as these complex design objects and so hopefully through this this is sort of concept at this debris this constellation of objects and artifacts from the design process sort of alongside these sort of installations that provide these different perspectives of video games do we hope to give them a much fuller picture of that game as a design object that they perhaps would not have been able to gain had they been brought into the space and just had to watch over someone's shoulder as they play through the game and so this exhibition is all I'm Utley a risk that we did something that sort of went against the norms of what people expect from video game exhibitions and it's something that I hope other curators go on to do that go on to build on this sort of curatorial language that other people have set down before to try difficult different radical ways of exhibiting this complex but complex meeting but one that is song so much that needs so much to have the

breathing space that museums and cultural spaces provide to illuminate and provide information and raise the cultural literacy about video games and ultimately the response in the reaction that we've had from the games community about this exhibition has one that has been frequently sort of positive and at times emotional with many designers just sort of saying that they find it so rare and unusual or unexpected to be able to see video games as they understand them and as they appreciate them within these contexts and that way is why for me that it is so important to continue this way to continue finding different radical ways to explore video games within museum spaces is to help raise this cultural literacy to help fill the vacuum that an absence of knowledge of the way that video game design exists to and to be able to explore as well to move beyond survey exhibitions to explore different niches and alternative histories so that is a very very brief overview of just a small aspect of the exhibition there's sort of motivations and approaches that we took to that and the

way that that was realized in this space as I say the exhibition will be opening up in Vienna Dundee on the 20th of April and then traveling internationally after that so if you get the chance to see the exhibition then please obviously do also I noticed in the GDC bookstore that the exhibition catalog is for sale so please do also pop over there and take a look at the exhibition back catalogue but yeah thank you so much for coming out this morning and for taking time to listen to the work and to get embrace sort of ideas and conversations about video game curation thank you you